bloodline wrote:
is the default WB screen 16.8 million or 65536?
new to such things I dont know the difference,
The actual colour depth is chosen by you at the boot screen. The 16bit displays have 65536 colours, the 32bit (and 24bit) displays have 16.8 million colours.
There is also a VGA option that is just in case you don't have a modern graphics card, that only has 16 colours.
The Nvidia option defaults to 16bit, and the resolution can be adjusted using the screen mode prefs in the prefs dir.
I dont want 16 bit as its less colours than HAM8,
32 bit via byte per component with one extra byte
possibly unused is the best way to do graphics:
you can read/write an entire pixel in one read/write cycle,
ditto each component,
24 bit via byte per component is next best where
each component is via 1 read/write,
16 bit is no good because its 5 + 6 + 5 bits per
component ie its irregular, 15 bits is regular
however 15 and 16 bits are no good because
its slow to access components: shift + mask,
15 and 16 bit are good for reading an entire pixel,
but bad from the component POV,
I found so much further stuff this time that
I now think it is very nearly mature,
so I think it can take off without backwards 68k
compatibility,
We think so too.
you will need to sort out the browser though,
as you operate through the internet,
how difficult is it to implement the TCP/IP stack,
its one area I know nothing about,
I still havent found gcc on it, though I found
the includes and gcc libraries, you have a lot
of gcc stuff including libjpeg,
jpeg is very very portable so it should port to
everywhere very straightforwardly,
gcc is not included in the nightly build, at this time, as there are still issues with it.
All graphics manipulation should be done via the datatypes, so that all programs support all types of file. I belive we already have a jpeg.datatype.
darn! I have to read up about datatypes then,
will you have datatypes for sound then?
its a similar concept,
If you get a Nvidia (ie GeForce) graphics card you will notice a massive speed up if you select "NVIDIA" at the boot options.
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PCWorld had this for £99, is that a good price?
what is the full product name?
Is it A1 and Pegasos2 compatible?
Nvidia vs Radeon? will you eventually have Radeon support?
is it worth me waiting?
Any Nvidia based card will do for AROS. Just get the best you can afford. I would probably not spend more than £150 on one.
The A1 and Pegasos, are compatible with current AGP specs as far as I know.
We have a couple of people working on Radeon drivers.
I may wait a bit then, I have lots of figuring out
to do on this new machine,
Is there any way I can boot to Windows XP with the
AROS CD still in the drive?
if you type e during the GRUB boot stages, and go to the boot console, typing "windows" (IIRC) will boot windows.
this is useful info,
I will try this out,
can I reconnect my existing SCSI FFS drives to
my new PC SCSI interface and use them AS-IS?
Is there a risk factor as with WinUAE or is it
totally safe?
AROS has no SCSI.device so it can't read SCSI drives. I would be surprised if you PC even had a SCSI connector. you are welcome to write a SCSI.device if you wish though.
its probably too early for me to attempt a h/w device,
I've just landed on Mars, so I need to do simple minded
things first,
BTW I think scsi.device is quite simple from exec's POV,
all the work is in the 3rd party h/w: interface +
devices making life very easy for the
programmer and OS people,
its just essentially 2 arrays from exec's POV, command and data, command will be eg 6, 10 or 12 bytes for SCSI-3
(I think, several years since I last looked at this)
exec only needs to know size of command and data (I think),
first the interface transmits command to the h/w,
which eg says "write 1000 bytes starting at position 100",
then the interface transmits "data" which will be the
1000 bytes, everything is transmitted independent of
endianess, most significant byte first ISTR,
thats it, "command" itself may be very complicated eg
for CD-R's, but that is the remote h/w's problem
not exec's,
the great thing about SCSI is it abstracts the
driver problem, its also backwardly and forwardly
compatible,
:you can run a SCSI-3 device from a SCSI-2 interface,
and vice versa, (I think!)
on my A1200 I can connect I think 12 SCSI devices
as I have 2 SCSI interfaces, Blizzard SCSI and
Squirrel SCSI,
you never run out of slots,
try connecting 12 IDE drives to an A1200!
and IDE is just Hard disks isnt it??
SCSI is Hard disks, printers, scanners, D-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc,
:I think at least 10 device classes,
The engineering behind it is very complex,
eg you can have X--Y--Z--computer and switch off Y
while in use and the messages continue no probs
between X and the computer,
You are saying that I shouldnt install AROS to this
current internal drive?
I want to try and only use external drives, so I can
selectively switch the power off as a virus precaution,
can I install AROS to some such external drive?
what is the best type of external drive to get?
(low cost + high speed),
Don't install AROS to your Windows hard drive. AROS will reformat it and turn it into an Amiga Formatted Hard drive.
When AROS gets USB support you will be able to install it onto a USB Memory stick (or USB hard drive) and boot from that. But AROS is still waiting USB drivers.
AROS should be able to read an FFS IDE drive fine.
install it onto a Memory stick!
can you get external IDE's?
booting AROS from CD suggests AROS understands the CD,
how does it manage that?
2 questions on little-endian x86 AROS:
1. Have you a version that runs above Windows?
2. Have you a version of UAE that runs above
either even if its not integrated?
because I may then use that instead of WinUAE
for my 68k environment,
I have some really useful things which can only be
run in 68k,
There is not AROS Hosted for windows, yet. But it will come, people are looking into it.
UAE is included with the nightly build, but the GUI doesn't work yet as Adam hasn't linked it. You will also need to provide an Amiga ROM image as the "Real Amiga" build of AROS needs to be matured.
ok, I have to look into this UAE,
can it be used without the GUI?
I have a real Amiga for the ROM image,
I tried out some of the Extras programs which looked
very impressive, some of the Windowing is just as good
as Windows XP,
would it be possible to reintroduce an OS1.2 click to back
gadget? maybe via some Prefs program for standard gadgets,
I never liked having to click twice to move an
in between window out of view on OS3,
if you select "Execute Command" and type "opaque" , you will get solid windows :-) You can find the opaque commodity in the Tools dir.
The Click to back gadget was removed because it is redundant. But If you want on, you are welcome to add the code for one, that can be used in different window themes. I will make an OS1.x theme, but I had not planned to include a click to back gadget,
to get better window management, select "Execute Command" and type "clicktofront double" , you will then be able to double click any where on the window to bring it to the front of the dispaly, then hitting the Depth gadget will drop the window in one click :-) You can find the clicktofront commodity in the Tools dir.
sounds like I will be doing both of these,
on XP there is a problem: I bring a small window
to the foreground to see whats on it to copy into a big window,
problem is the moment I click on the big window to
activate it, it is brought to the front obscuring the
small window which I am trying to read,
takes quite a bit of effort to have the small window
in the foreground with the big window active so it
can be typed into,
I regard this as a design flaw, single clicking should
not depth arrange a window except if the click is on a
gadget,
I need to be able to activate a window without altering
its depth, so I need double-click-to-front,
I noticed your shell has tab completion via requester
exactly the way I want it, is the shell King-con or
have you reimplemented it from scratch??
I didnt check whether you've fixed the square bracket
problem on King-Con, on King con if there are square
brackets in the shell output, if you scroll back to
them they vanish! Thats why I use () in the usage info
in my programs such as the above trackdisk.c,
KingCon is not used, all features are coded directly into Zune (AROS's version of MUI), and not as third party add on.
MUI is 3rd party,
I found Zune very confusing, very difficult to find
what I want on it,
I prefer the other Prefs programs,
direct + uncluttered + self-explanatory + useful,
unpretentious with no bloat,
usually the Prefs settings I want are:
screen colour(s),
keyboard delay + repeat,
keyboard,
mouse speed,
screen fonts:
(I like big fonts: topaz-8 on a 640 x 256 size,)
screen resolution (I find all fonts wrong on
the very high resolutions so I may use a lower
res eg 640 x 256 screen just to get the fonts
right.)
This is a subjective point but I think
a Prefs programs name should be a self-descriptor,
so Prefs/Mouse and Prefs/Palette etc are exactly
what the name says,
eg Prefs/Serial is for setting the serial port,
but Prefs/Zune, who or what is Zune and why
should I want to change it?
why not
Prefs/ScrimbleZooplig
?
Zune sounds a bit pretentious,
In fact on my first trial of AROS, I tried all
sorts of Prefs progs but not Zune because
the name is a nondescriptor,
I think it would be much better to divide Zune into lots
of small Prefs programs eg Prefs/String_gadget,
somehow (probably from clicking the wrong buttons
on Zune) I got my icons text with white text in a
black outline, I wanted to change this to
usual black text with no outline,
I could not do it, I also was unable to refind
how to change the screen colour. I found it once
but never again and I went around in circles
through Zunes incomprehensible options,
eventually I got fed up and started looking at other
directories instead,
whats wrong with just having Prefs/Palette
or Prefs/Screencolour?
I'm sure Zune can do the above 2 things,
but I gave up trying to find how,
Zune is the only part of AROS which is more
confusing than Windows XP,
Is there an API or full documentation for the prefs?
maybe I will write a shell command:
set_screen_colour r g b
please dont tell me the screen colour is in a file
zune.prefs, oh no, it is isnt it?
In that case I give up!
The transparent window with a circle on it looked
really interesting, I want to see what the mechanism
for doing this, non rectangular windows should be now
possible,
We have non regular window support, I think there is a demo called "roundwindow" somewhere.
The mechanism for this is built around the standard AmigaOS layers system. But AROS has enhanced the basicly layers abilities.
I'll look out for this and try it out,
I can see that nonrectangular windows are going to be
a bit too much of an effort to code,
I think the transparency is a more practical feature
than nonrectangular windows,
I have to try out click to front on the
transparent region, see if I have to click on
the visible part,
